Chapter 9: Questions and Answers
|Preceded by = Chapter 8: Broken Glass and Other Things |Followed by = Chapter 10: Doctor Disaster Versus the Creepy Space Aliens from Outer Space}} Questions and Answers is the ninth chapter of Gunnerkrigg Court. It may be found . Summary Mort is lounging about in a storeroom when he hears a noise in a vent and realizes someone is in the next room. Sensing the chance to scare, he goes through the vent into the other room, where Kat is sitting, her back turned. Seeing she's alone, he creeps toward her, contemplating how to scare her. He goes through several forms before settling on a devil, and is about to scare Kat when Annie says "Boo." Mort is scared out of his wits and reverts back to his original form. Mort is pleased Annie made it back and Annie introduces him to Kat. He then apologizes for trying to scare her, and Kat gleefully forgives him. Annie thanks Mort for the blinker stone and he blushes. "Aw shucks, 't weren't no big thing." Annie then summarizes her adventures in the chasm from the previous chapter. Mort claims that the ghost that attacked Annie wasn't supposed to be able to cross the river. Annie says Muut thought the same thing. Hearing Muut's name, Mort asks Annie how she knows the guide, saying "He's an important guy". Annie explains that while she was in Good Hope Hospital, she could see spirits wandering its halls, invisible to the hospital staff. Her mother could see them too and told her not to be afraid of them, that they were "performing an important duty". However, she never told Annie what that duty was. She met Muut one night while sneaking around to see them. After Muut she met many others, and they would share their stories with her. Rather than being afraid, she made good friends with the guides, also called psychopomps, though she never understood why the patient whose room they might be in at the time would be gone the next morning. Mort says that the natural ability to see the guides is incredibly rare, and says that it must be because she was so spiritually attractive, a thing he noticed the first time they met. Kat expresses wishes of learning how the TicTocs' inner mechanisms work, and reasons they must be some sort of monitoring system. Annie asks what happened after she fell, and Kat says that Eglamore and Reynardine came back together, looking very upset. Eglamore told her what happened and to go to bed. Rather than do that, Kat set to work on her hovercraft, featured in Chapter 8. The class bell rings, and Annie and Kat leave Mort to go to their next period. At the end of the day, Annie goes into Eglamore's office; he had wanted to see her. Eglamore hands Annie a detention slip, saying not to break the rules again; and if she did, to be more clever about it. He says her mother broke the rules often, but never let herself get caught. This irritates Annie, who says Eglamore is giving her inappropriate advice. Eglamore says he knows Annie has a "problem" with him and hands Reynardine back, saying he doesn't want a fight. When Annie asks why he doesn't keep it, he says it would break Annie and Reynardine's control contract and Reynardine would be free to cause havoc again. Eglamore also says he'll be keeping a close eye on them both. Annie asks what happened to Robot, though she just calls him "a robot," Eglamore not knowing that Annie knew the robot. Eglamore states he was disposed of. Annie asks about Robot's organic arm, to which Eglamore replies it's not important. "It's been taken care of." In an artificial habitat room somewhere in the Court, we see the severed organic arm on a grassy hill. (In this chapter's bonus page, , Annie finally remembers to allow Reynardine to speak again. (See Chapter 7.) References to alchemy * In the last panel of , the alchemic symbols for gold, lead and mercury can be seen. 09